The traditional paradigm of the Indo-European problem and the “Coming of the Greeks”

Friday, April 17, 2015

The question about the “Coming of the Greeks”, i.e. about the origins of the Greek language and its first association with the later Greek mainland, has always been an important aspect of the wider Indo-European problem. Thodoris Giannopoulos (Open University of Cyprus) will give a lecture about the “Traditional paradigm of the Indo-European problem and the ‘Coming of the Greeks””, in the framework of the Aegean lecture series, organized by Aegeus – Society for Aegean Prehistory, in collaboration with the Swedish Institute at Athens.

As Thodoris Giannopoulos will explain: “Within the context of this research quest, the understanding of several linguistic and cultural expressions of the Aegean prehistory was very soon attached to the long-standing and predominant epistemological paradigm of the Indo-European problem. One of the main features of this paradigm, a very ‘compressing’ view regarding the linguistic time depth, was almost obliviously combined with a very comparable chronological perception of the past of the 1st millennium BC Greeks. This perception can be reduced to the still powerful influence of the similarly compressing chronological ‘arrangement’ of the Greek heroic genealogies and the other ancient mythological traditions. The aim of this lecture is to demonstrate that challenging the traditional epistemological paradigm of the Indo-European problem can reshape the kind of questions we can ask regarding many significant aspects of the Aegean prehistory.”